DOM Grand Rounds | From Routine to Murder - Anatomy in Nazi Germany and its Legacies for Today

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Department of Medicine
Medicine Grand Rounds - Holocaust Genocide and Contemporary Bioethics Program:
From Routine to Murder - Anatomy in Nazi Germany and its Legacies for Today
Presented by Sabine Hildebrandt, MD Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of General Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt is joining us to discuss her research on the history and ethics of anatomy, specifically the history of anatomy in Nazi Germany. We’ll talk about the current state of body donation programs in North America, who has power over knowledge of the human body, and why it's so critical to talk about the dark parts of our history so we can use that knowledge to do better in our approaches to anatomy and science.
Learning Objectives:
Describe anatomy as a model for the changes in medicine during the National Socialist [Nazi] regime, when scientists’ and health professionals used opportunities provided by the regime for their own purposes, resulting in ethical transgressions.
Be able to name the breadth of the political spectrum among German anatomists and describe the extent of collaboration with the Nazi regime with regard to the use of bodies of Nazi victims for anatomical purposes.
Name some of the many legacies of this history that reach into the present: questions around the ethics of scientific knowledge gain, the handling of human remains, and the use of data and images unethically obtained.